WearMoCap: multimodal pose tracking for ubiquitous robot control using a smartwatch

We present WearMoCap, an open-source library to track the human pose from smartwatch sensor data and leveraging pose predictions for ubiquitous robot control. WearMoCap operates in three modes: 1) a Watch Only mode, which uses a smartwatch only, 2) a novel Upper Arm mode, which utilizes the smartpho...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fabian C. Weigend, Neelesh Kumar, Oya Aran, Heni Ben Amor
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2025-01-01
Series:Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frobt.2024.1478016/full
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We present WearMoCap, an open-source library to track the human pose from smartwatch sensor data and leveraging pose predictions for ubiquitous robot control. WearMoCap operates in three modes: 1) a Watch Only mode, which uses a smartwatch only, 2) a novel Upper Arm mode, which utilizes the smartphone strapped onto the upper arm and 3) a Pocket mode, which determines body orientation from a smartphone in any pocket. We evaluate all modes on large-scale datasets consisting of recordings from up to 8 human subjects using a range of consumer-grade devices. Further, we discuss real-robot applications of underlying works and evaluate WearMoCap in handover and teleoperation tasks, resulting in performances that are within 2 cm of the accuracy of the gold-standard motion capture system. Our Upper Arm mode provides the most accurate wrist position estimates with a Root Mean Squared prediction error of 6.79 cm. To evaluate WearMoCap in more scenarios and investigate strategies to mitigate sensor drift, we publish the WearMoCap system with thorough documentation as open source. The system is designed to foster future research in smartwatch-based motion capture for robotics applications where ubiquity matters. www.github.com/wearable-motion-capture.
ISSN:2296-9144